Stuart Wheeler, the former Ukip treasurer who wined and dined around eight
backbench Tory MPs in an attempt to encourage them to switch allegiance, is
a multi-millionaire who owns a castle in Kent

As far as political donors go, Stuart Wheeler has rarely been one to shun the limelight.

The 79-year-old started out working life as a barrister but made his fortune from spread-betting, after founding IG Index in 1974.

The flotation of the company in 2000 earned him £90 million, and in 2002 he sold shares worth £7.3 million to help buy the Grade I listed Chilham Castle in Kent.

He came to prominence in political life in 2001 when he donated £5 million to the Conservative election campaign, saying he was impressed by William Hague's leadership.

In 2008 he publicly established his Eurosceptic credentials when he took the Government to the High Court to challenge Gordon Brown’s decision to ratify the Lisbon Treaty without holding a public vote.

Although he lost the case, the move generated a great deal of publicity and forced Mr Brown to delay the formal ratification until after the ruling.

However in 2009 Mr Wheeler, who has three daughters with his wife Tessa, was expelled from the Tories by David Cameron after donating £100,000 to Ukip. Explaining his decision to fund Nigel Farage’s party, Mr Wheeler, who has a portrait of Margaret Thatcher on the wall of his offices, said at the time that their position was “far nearer to what I would like to happen than anybody else’s”.

In 2010 he made a bid to obtain a seat in the Commons under the auspices of Trust, a short-lived “anti-corruption” party he formed in the wake of the MPs expenses scandal. However he failed to make a significant dent in the majority enjoyed by Greg Barker, the Conservative MP, in Bexhill and Battle, coming in fourth place with 2,699 votes.

A year later, Mr Wheeler was brought firmly into the Ukip fold as treasurer of the party, with Mr Farage saying that he would help his party to raise much-needed funds.